WESTFIELD – A year ago he was a ghost, purposefully working out of sight, showing his face once every few weeks. As the questions and the uncertainties and the doubts continued to linger, behind closed doors, Andrew Luck was lying to himself. He believed his arm was fine, that the pain wouldn’t last, that everything, eventually, would go back to normal.

By now, you know the story: It never did.

The hard lesson he’d come to accept, after an entire season in what’s supposed to be his prime, was lost: He was lying to himself. His arm wasn’t fine. His arm was “revolting” after workouts, he’d later admit.

So much progress has come since, both in Luck’s surgically-repaired throwing shoulder and the way he approaches the game of football. “I think, more than anything, I’m being honest with myself,” he offered Friday, eight days into training camp at Westfield’s Grand Park. To be clear, no Colt has been in a better mood. Luck was giddy on Day 1, beaming ear to ear, vowing he felt better than he had in “a long, long time.”

Nine days later, his smile’s still there. Here’s why:

“My arm continues to feel stronger and stronger,” Luck said Friday, a few hours before taking the field for the team’s eighth practice. “I’ll get tired and I’ll recover and I’ll bounce back, and I feel like I’m on a great plan. It’s been a lot of fun so far.”

The way Luck sees it, most encouraging is his progress: The seventh-year quarterback has made tangible improvements across his first five throwing sessions. “The eye in the sky don’t lie,” he said Friday, an old Matt Hasselbeck line he borrowed about practice tape telling it like it is. And it’s not just the increased workload. Luck is relearning life as a quarterback. He’s seeing a defense for the first time in a year and a half. He’s feeling a rush. He’s having to drop the ball over the safety and into the arms of his receiver. All of that.

He’s not there yet, but with each passing practice, he gets closer and closer to where he once was.

“The first practice was like, ‘What is going on? How do you hand the ball off? Where is everybody?’ I left practice feeling like I didn’t know what I just did,” he said. “Then the second practice it started to feel like (I was) getting back into a groove.

“The feeling has gotten more comfortable, more comfortable each day. I still have a few head-scratching moments in practice. I’ll throw a ball – I threw one the other day to T.Y., a deeper one – and I was like, ‘Alright, I have no idea where this ball is going. Let’s hope it ends up in the right place.’ I hadn’t thrown that route in a long time. There are still moments like that.”

Luck has also been noticeably hard on himself, especially during individual drills in practice. He’ll smack his hands together or scream out in disgust. Why? Part of re-acclimation to the game this summer includes subtle changes to his throwing motion, most of which are intended to help Luck better utilize his lower body before releasing the football.

Long a master of capitalizing on a broken play, for years Luck’s prodigious athletic talents allowed him to ignore the proper fundamentals for the sake of a first down. But it also got him into trouble, plenty of it, and the issue grew much worse while he played through injury in the 2015 and 2016 seasons.

Starting with his work with QB guru Tom House in California this spring, Luck has made it a priority to clean up those inconsistencies in his motion.

CLOSE

Indianapolis Colts quarterback Andrew Luck took a lot of hits and missed all of last season. Signs in this year's training camp have been positive.
Indianapolis Star

“I’m trying,” he said. “It’s a work in progress. There are times when I revert back to some old habits I’ve created ... it’s easier to do in drills, before practice, routes vs. air, throwing to wideouts. When you get into a team situation, you can’t think, ‘Is my back foot placed perfectly?’ Then you’re hit in the head or sacked. Translating that so it becomes second nature is a big part of practice.”

While new coach Frank Reich has hinted that he intends to play Luck a bit longer than expected in the team’s preseason debut next Thursday in Seattle, the two haven’t sat down and discussed it. Luck will likely see a quarter at most, and in reality, it could be much less.

A little over a week into camp, he’s cleared plenty of hurdles thus far, hurdles he hadn’t cleared in a long, long time. Plenty remain.